Academia is doing a lot of advances every year. The fact it didn't make _this one_ is not really relevant to postulate that academia is inefficient. It happens

Academia is doing a lot of advances every year. The fact it didn't make _this one_ is not really relevant to postulate that academia is inefficient. It happens that the team at deepmind is apparently pretty damn good at deep learning problems, so they're going faster than matching academia labs. It's not to say that academia has none of the problems you mentioned, but it's imo unreasonable to expect that, in a world where both public and private labs exist, only public ones would make advances.